Boys with a Dove

An everyday scene: two boys and a dove, painted by Jan Toorop in 1888. It comes from his earliest years as a painter, when he worked in a plain, realist manner, before the Symbolist pictures he is now better known for. The subject is modest and the handling direct, the kind of genre painting Dutch and Belgian artists produced steadily through the 1880s. In these same years Toorop was moving between England, Belgium and the Netherlands and showing with the young avant-garde group Les XX in Brussels. A canvas like this stayed close to home, with two children and a bird.